4 ms·

Why we need to rethink “Women in Tech”

34 points by bootload 15y ago

Volscio 15y ago
There's a generation of female coders coming out of NYC soon -- seeing half my Nature of Code in Processing class being female and a lot of my female classmates working with OpenProcessing, Pocode, etc. Likewise in DC there are already a lot of up-and-coming tough-as-nails journalistas starting to run stuff. I think they're a little further ahead than the female coders right now though. You'll see this stuff happen in east coast cities first since the ratios are so favorable for highly-educated, intelligent, fiercely independent women there.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  Part of the problem with the article though is that it seems to assume that "tech" means "hot tech startups." And "startup" here has a specific meaning that assumes that it does not include the self-employed and therefore involves a sort of work style that historically women have actively avoided. A third of the software engineers and developers out there are women. I am willing to bet though that the numbers in hot tech start-ups are significantly less than that. And yet, what of the woman who says "I don't want to work this job while I raise my kid? I am going to become a freelance tech writer! (or developer, or whatever)" They don't count in these metrics. Which may also say something about the sexism latent in the metrics..... BTW, two of the most talented programmers I have ever met in my life were women. One worked in academia, and the other, despite her important achievements, worked at a tech-centric coffee shop as a sysadmin, and later got a job as a developer for a relatively obscure yet stable company.
bane 15y ago
It's interesting that we think the lack of women in tech is a bug to be solved. Just because half of the population is female, it doesn't necessarily follow that half of any particular selection of the population must be female. Put another way, we lament that there are not enough women in tech, not enough women ceos, not enough women in <insert high prestige white collar work>, but I can't personally recall seeing a great deal of frustration over the lack of women in trash pickup, construction, boxing and prison populations. (full disclosure, I do think it's a bug that more women aren't in tech, but I thought I'd play devil's advocate for a moment..my technical cofounder is a woman).
- wonnage 15y ago
  I don't think the problem is numerical parity. This is wholly anecdotal, but I've found working in mixed-gender groups is more pleasant. There's less of a tendency to goof off/take on a frat house mentality when the programmer team isn't all-male.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  This post may not seem very PC but here it goes. One thing to point out is that historically women have had different economic priorities than men, and usually still do. In the Wild West for example, for a long time, there were 50 men to one woman, roughly the same gender ratio as in the early days of the internet and in open source software engineering today. When we see these long pervasive questions, it's worth asking why. Certainly gender roles have changed enough since the early 19th century that this can't be the only factor, or have they? At least in Western history, women have historically (and continue to today) looked for more security than adventure, and therefore tended to be very under-represented in cutting-edge fields and immature industries, while moving in later as things begin to stabilize. Women have historically run safe industries involving commodities everyone needs (thread, yarn, cloth), and take fewer risks. So my take here is that the start-up culture itself goes counter to what most women generally want: a stable supply of income structured in a way which is friendly to raising a family. This is a bug, as you say. But it cannot be solved with a little outreach or so forth because if more women wanted to be involved at these early stages of startups, they would be. A better approach IMO is to look at how something like open source software consulting and development can fit into a more integrated lifestyle where work and family life are no longer separate. This brings women into tech but on terms that are more in line with current career trends of career choices that women not only are making today but have in the past. This means focusing on economic opportunities which are conducive to this sort of integrated lifestyle and worrying less about CEO's of hot startups. I am also going to make a claim that may seem even more controversial: I am willing to bet that women are more likely to be self-employed than men, and that there may be a lot more women in tech, self-employed, than we know. We may simply be measuring wrong.
  - gcb 15y ago
wisty 15y ago
Old topic. Salient talking points: 1) "Geek" culture is not heterodox. It's very accepting of fat guys who like faux-Mexican food, and anime; but not so accepting of other non-conformists. Many women are not fat guys who like faux-Mexican food, and anime. 2) Women are encouraged to work hard. Men are encouraged to be talented. This is true of teachers, parents, peers, and managers. Coding is something that requires more talent than hard work (at least, to get started); due to the high barrier of entry. 3) There is some ugly sexism in parts of tech. There is ugly sexism in other career paths (finance, sales); but we can do a lot better. 4) Some women choose to have more personal time, rather than staying up till 3am coding. It's hard to tell if this is really relevant - Patrick McKenzie claims to have run business on 5 hours a week. And no-one here (I hope) think driving code monkeys on 80 hour/week death marches is really a good idea (due to tiredness-induced bugs).
- kiba 15y ago
  2) Women are encouraged to work hard. Men are encouraged to be talented. This is true of teachers, parents, peers, and managers. Coding is something that requires more talent than hard work (at least, to get started); due to the high barrier of entry. I disputed the notion that programming required "talent", whatever it means. Learning to program isn't rocket science, but it required a lot of dedication and patience. Some women choose to have more personal time, rather than staying up till 3am coding. I thought coding until 3AM in the morning is the definition of personal time for programmers.
  - wisty 15y ago
    > I disputed the notion that programming required "talent", whatever it means. Learning to program isn't rocket science, but it required a lot of dedication and patience. The dichotomy between hard work and talent can be a false one. What I'm talking about is teachers rewarding girls for solving easy questions without any fuss, and rewarding boys for solving hard problems. Programming requires hard work and talent, but it's seen as talent by outsiders (i.e. 99% of the people most high-school students know). While codeacademy and learn-x-the-hard-way may help lower the barrier, learning to code has, historically, been really bloody hard.
patio11 15y ago
Both journalism and "journalism" are meta-games. They don't really track where the industry is -- they track a separate and not necessarily representative alternative advancement system. You earn journo-points in an entirely different way than you earn geek-points or engineering-points or startup-points or money-points. (P.S. All of above available independently from each other, too.) The criteria for awarding journo-points are set a wee bit by fashion, a wee bit by tradition, a wee bit by merit, and a whole heck of a lot by the desire of journalists to have power and privilege and the desire of media outlets to have the opportunity to sell the attention of people who have high purchasing power. If one hypothetically wanted to get ladies more journo-points, one would not tell them to improve their coding ability, because the ROI on coding ability in producing journo-points is pretty poor. I don't think most people are really interested in the social justice maximizing allocation of journo-points, though. (n.b. There are a variety of activities which are worth zero or negative geek-points that are worth scads of journo-points which I could use as an example here. I'm self-censoring because I don't want to accuse the folks on those Top X Lists of benefiting from them even though, in aggregate, they certainly benefit from them.) I would be very careful making inferences from present allocations of journo-points into how we can better incentivize any group of people into seeing that startup-points or geek-points or engineering-points are what they should be optimizing for, if we decide that that is indeed our goal. (On the specific subject of gender, I think that at least part of the discussion should probably be "What kind of points do women at the margin want?" and, if that isn't geek-points, "Should we convince women at the margin to sacrifice what they currently value for geek-points?")
gcb 15y ago
It's sexist. Period.
eplanit 15y ago
Why is there no similar concern over the disproportionately few women roofers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. etc? Those are skilled trades, and can lead to solid and stable income for an individual and his/her family, as well as the potential to grow into a larger business. My point is that there seems to be bias in where some people want "equality".
- Anechoic 15y ago
  Why is there no similar concern over the disproportionately few women roofers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. etc? There are - you probably don't travel in those circles so you don't see the outreach efforts (I work with a lot of union trades and they have outreach programs for those exact areas you listed).

34 points by bootload 15y ago

There's a generation of female coders coming out of NYC soon -- seeing half my Nature of Code in Processing class being female and a lot of my female classmates working with OpenProcessing, Pocode, etc. Likewise in DC there are already a lot of up-and-coming tough-as-nails journalistas starting to run stuff. I think they're a little further ahead than the female coders right now though. You'll see this stuff happen in east coast cities first since the ratios are so favorable for highly-educated, intelligent, fiercely independent women there.

einhverfr 15y ago
Part of the problem with the article though is that it seems to assume that "tech" means "hot tech startups." And "startup" here has a specific meaning that assumes that it does not include the self-employed and therefore involves a sort of work style that historically women have actively avoided. A third of the software engineers and developers out there are women. I am willing to bet though that the numbers in hot tech start-ups are significantly less than that. And yet, what of the woman who says "I don't want to work this job while I raise my kid? I am going to become a freelance tech writer! (or developer, or whatever)" They don't count in these metrics. Which may also say something about the sexism latent in the metrics..... BTW, two of the most talented programmers I have ever met in my life were women. One worked in academia, and the other, despite her important achievements, worked at a tech-centric coffee shop as a sysadmin, and later got a job as a developer for a relatively obscure yet stable company.

bane 15y ago

It's interesting that we think the lack of women in tech is a bug to be solved. Just because half of the population is female, it doesn't necessarily follow that half of any particular selection of the population must be female. Put another way, we lament that there are not enough women in tech, not enough women ceos, not enough women in <insert high prestige white collar work>, but I can't personally recall seeing a great deal of frustration over the lack of women in trash pickup, construction, boxing and prison populations. (full disclosure, I do think it's a bug that more women aren't in tech, but I thought I'd play devil's advocate for a moment..my technical cofounder is a woman).

wonnage 15y ago
I don't think the problem is numerical parity. This is wholly anecdotal, but I've found working in mixed-gender groups is more pleasant. There's less of a tendency to goof off/take on a frat house mentality when the programmer team isn't all-male.
einhverfr 15y ago
This post may not seem very PC but here it goes. One thing to point out is that historically women have had different economic priorities than men, and usually still do. In the Wild West for example, for a long time, there were 50 men to one woman, roughly the same gender ratio as in the early days of the internet and in open source software engineering today. When we see these long pervasive questions, it's worth asking why. Certainly gender roles have changed enough since the early 19th century that this can't be the only factor, or have they? At least in Western history, women have historically (and continue to today) looked for more security than adventure, and therefore tended to be very under-represented in cutting-edge fields and immature industries, while moving in later as things begin to stabilize. Women have historically run safe industries involving commodities everyone needs (thread, yarn, cloth), and take fewer risks. So my take here is that the start-up culture itself goes counter to what most women generally want: a stable supply of income structured in a way which is friendly to raising a family. This is a bug, as you say. But it cannot be solved with a little outreach or so forth because if more women wanted to be involved at these early stages of startups, they would be. A better approach IMO is to look at how something like open source software consulting and development can fit into a more integrated lifestyle where work and family life are no longer separate. This brings women into tech but on terms that are more in line with current career trends of career choices that women not only are making today but have in the past. This means focusing on economic opportunities which are conducive to this sort of integrated lifestyle and worrying less about CEO's of hot startups. I am also going to make a claim that may seem even more controversial: I am willing to bet that women are more likely to be self-employed than men, and that there may be a lot more women in tech, self-employed, than we know. We may simply be measuring wrong.
- gcb 15y ago

wisty 15y ago

Old topic. Salient talking points: 1) "Geek" culture is not heterodox. It's very accepting of fat guys who like faux-Mexican food, and anime; but not so accepting of other non-conformists. Many women are not fat guys who like faux-Mexican food, and anime. 2) Women are encouraged to work hard. Men are encouraged to be talented. This is true of teachers, parents, peers, and managers. Coding is something that requires more talent than hard work (at least, to get started); due to the high barrier of entry. 3) There is some ugly sexism in parts of tech. There is ugly sexism in other career paths (finance, sales); but we can do a lot better. 4) Some women choose to have more personal time, rather than staying up till 3am coding. It's hard to tell if this is really relevant - Patrick McKenzie claims to have run business on 5 hours a week. And no-one here (I hope) think driving code monkeys on 80 hour/week death marches is really a good idea (due to tiredness-induced bugs).

kiba 15y ago
2) Women are encouraged to work hard. Men are encouraged to be talented. This is true of teachers, parents, peers, and managers. Coding is something that requires more talent than hard work (at least, to get started); due to the high barrier of entry. I disputed the notion that programming required "talent", whatever it means. Learning to program isn't rocket science, but it required a lot of dedication and patience. Some women choose to have more personal time, rather than staying up till 3am coding. I thought coding until 3AM in the morning is the definition of personal time for programmers.
- wisty 15y ago
  > I disputed the notion that programming required "talent", whatever it means. Learning to program isn't rocket science, but it required a lot of dedication and patience. The dichotomy between hard work and talent can be a false one. What I'm talking about is teachers rewarding girls for solving easy questions without any fuss, and rewarding boys for solving hard problems. Programming requires hard work and talent, but it's seen as talent by outsiders (i.e. 99% of the people most high-school students know). While codeacademy and learn-x-the-hard-way may help lower the barrier, learning to code has, historically, been really bloody hard.

patio11 15y ago

Both journalism and "journalism" are meta-games. They don't really track where the industry is -- they track a separate and not necessarily representative alternative advancement system. You earn journo-points in an entirely different way than you earn geek-points or engineering-points or startup-points or money-points. (P.S. All of above available independently from each other, too.) The criteria for awarding journo-points are set a wee bit by fashion, a wee bit by tradition, a wee bit by merit, and a whole heck of a lot by the desire of journalists to have power and privilege and the desire of media outlets to have the opportunity to sell the attention of people who have high purchasing power. If one hypothetically wanted to get ladies more journo-points, one would not tell them to improve their coding ability, because the ROI on coding ability in producing journo-points is pretty poor. I don't think most people are really interested in the social justice maximizing allocation of journo-points, though. (n.b. There are a variety of activities which are worth zero or negative geek-points that are worth scads of journo-points which I could use as an example here. I'm self-censoring because I don't want to accuse the folks on those Top X Lists of benefiting from them even though, in aggregate, they certainly benefit from them.) I would be very careful making inferences from present allocations of journo-points into how we can better incentivize any group of people into seeing that startup-points or geek-points or engineering-points are what they should be optimizing for, if we decide that that is indeed our goal. (On the specific subject of gender, I think that at least part of the discussion should probably be "What kind of points do women at the margin want?" and, if that isn't geek-points, "Should we convince women at the margin to sacrifice what they currently value for geek-points?")

gcb 15y ago

It's sexist. Period.

eplanit 15y ago

Why is there no similar concern over the disproportionately few women roofers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. etc? Those are skilled trades, and can lead to solid and stable income for an individual and his/her family, as well as the potential to grow into a larger business. My point is that there seems to be bias in where some people want "equality".

Anechoic 15y ago
Why is there no similar concern over the disproportionately few women roofers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. etc? There are - you probably don't travel in those circles so you don't see the outreach efforts (I work with a lot of union trades and they have outreach programs for those exact areas you listed).